


Keep Yourself Warm

by neversaydie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Drinking, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 01:46:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neversaydie/pseuds/neversaydie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>5 times Sam saw self-injury scars on Dean, 1 time he asked about them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep Yourself Warm

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted here for a prompt: http://break-kitkat.livejournal.com/8592.html#cutid1

1.

Two fat pink lines greet him on his return from Stanford.

Sam doesn't try and kid himself, he knows what the scars on his brother's wrists are from. They're vertical, hypertrophic, and there's no way Dean would have risked the potential nerve damage if he intended to come out the other side still breathing. Still, Sam looks at his brother's self-assured smirk and familiar swagger and doesn't ask. 

Whatever the storm was, it's blown over now, and he doesn't want to rock the boat.

 

2.

Sometimes when Dean's drunk he likes to look at them. 

Sam knows they're there. The knowledge sits like an itch at the back of his brain, waiting for him to scratch it and ask. He watches his brother sit slouched on a motel bed, sleeve pushed up, tracing the thin silvery-pink lines - with his finger this time, instead of a knife. He wants to ask, wants to know if it was a knife, or a straight razor or piece of broken glass or his own fingernails, that left the tracks of damage behind in the first place.

He doesn't ask.

Maybe if Dad were still around, Sam thinks, he would. Maybe if he had the knowledge that there was some authority to tell. Maybe if there was someone around who he knew could make Dean stop. 

But there isn't. So he doesn't ask, because he doesn't want to know how useless he is when he can't fix what's broken.

 

3.

"I didn't know he still did that."

Bobby mutters the comment quietly, as he grabs some beers from the fridge next to where Sam is doing the dishes. Dean's finally got wise to his rock-paper-scissors strategy, and for the first time had won the toss, leaving his brother washing up while him and Bobby watched TV. Sam squints slightly at the old hunter, whose cap is pulled low on his face so his expression is hidden from prying eyes. 

"Did what?"

"What do you think, genius?" Bobby gestures with one of the beers to where they can just about see Dean through the partially-open door to the front room. Sam thinks of the new line running the length of Dean's arm that had slid out from under his sleeve at dinner, slick pink and newly-healed. "Ain't seen any creature leave scars like that. Seen a straight razor do it though."

"I figured." Sam keeps his voice low too, barely above a whisper. "How long's he been doing it for?"

"Since you were teens, maybe." Shrugging, Bobby pops the cap on a beer and takes a swig. "I thought he'd gotten over it. Maybe not, since his trip downstairs."

"Maybe." Sam doesn't ask anything more, much as he wants to. He's already broken the silent rule he's set for himself. Bobby eyes him for a moment and takes another drink; he never stops being amazed by how little these two actually know each other, like twins and strangers at the same time.

Sam hesitates with questions on his lips before he turns, picking up the dishcloth he'd dropped. Rolling his eyes, Bobby claps him on the shoulder briefly before moving away.

"You watch out for him." The closest thing they've got to a Dad now wags a finger in his face before heading into the other room, leaving Sam with a sink of dirty dishes and more questions than he started out with.

Later that night, staring at the crack in the ceiling above his too-small borrowed bed, Sam refuses to let himself feel guilty. He knows that when Dean goes to work on the car in the morning he's going to talk to Bobby, knows he's going to betray his brother's trust and the unspoken fact that this is something they do not talk about. He tells himself he refuses to feel guilty, he's doing it for Dean's own good.

Bobby he can ask. Bobby doesn't count. 

 

4\. 

"Sammy." The words are quiet through the bathroom door, but Sam's on his feet immediately. He knows that tone. "You there?"

"Yeah man." He crosses the room immediately, leans against the bathroom door to see if he can hear anything else to give him clues. It might be a panic attack, might be something more sinister; he knows that tone and it scares him shitless. "What's wrong?"

"Can you give me the first aid kit?" He's quiet, hesitant. He doesn't want Sam to ask. "I, uh, dropped my razor and it cut me on the way down."

"Is it bad?" Fumbling in his duffle, Sam grabs the too-familiar green pack and heads back to the bathroom door. Of course it was bad, he'd never find out about it if it wasn't. "Want me to take a look?"

"Nah, I'm good. Just gonna patch it up." His voice betrays him, as does the blood-stained hand that snakes through the tiny gap he opens the door to take the kit from Sam. Reluctantly, Sam hands over the kit and watches, unsurprised, as the door shuts in his face and the lock clicks shut again. 

"Dean." Frustrated, he rests his head against the cool, faded paint of the bathroom door and listens to his brother cursing and dropping things on the other side. "Will you just let me help?"

"I'm fine." It comes just before another crash and a stifled stream of swearing, and Sam just prays that Dean's not in real trouble: he doesn't want to be kicking down any doors tonight.

"You can't keep doing this." He says, quietly, unsure if he'll even be heard.

The silence that follows tells him he has.

 

5.

This time he does have to stitch Dean up. 

The cuts are too deep, the placement all wrong for non-lethal relief. His brother is drunk and numb to the pain that tells him when enough is enough, head lolling back on Sam's shoulder as he tries to keep him still. His skin's clammy and pale with blood loss, freckles standing out like pinpricks and dark circles under his eyes looking like a death sentence. 

"Din' mean to Sammy." He's unfocussed but earnest, and Sam shushes him in what he hopes is a soothing manner as he tries to stop the bleeding. "M'sorry."

"It's okay Dean, it's gonna be okay." He gets the second wrist under control and sets to work stitching the first one he'd staunched. "You have to stop doing this."

"S'an accident Sammy." Dean's eyes roll back in his head for a moment before he fights his way back to consciousness, mouthing wordlessly, and Sam almost wishes he'd pass out so he could pretend this was someone else he was stitching up. "Din' mean to."

"You have to stop."

"Don' wanna."

"For me, Dean. You have to stop doing this for me, okay? Please." He blinks back his tears because they'll only make his vision blurry, and he needs to concentrate on keeping his brother out of the hospital right now. Dean doesn't reply, having finally lost the fight to stay awake.

Sam finishes stitching his brother back together, and his hands don't shake. This is the end of it.

 

1.

It was awkward, especially when Dean woke up with a pounding hangover, in bloody clothes that Sam hadn't removed in case he disturbed the fresh stitches in his brother's arms, but it happened. The conversation no one wanted to have had finally, awkwardly, reluctantly, occurred.

"I don't understand it Dean." Sam's voice is hoarse from where he'd screamed himself out at his brother, then screamed at him some more for just sitting there taking it. "I want to help, I do. I just don't understand why you do it."

Dean studies his hands where they lie in his lap, stitches throbbing and fingernails a dirty blood-brown. He doesn't look at his little brother, but he knows it's now or never. He could easily tell Sam where to stick his psychology bullshit and piss him off enough to storm out, drop the subject and have it never come up again.   
That's what he did with Dad, who Sam is far more like than he wants to admit. But, Dean tells himself firmly as he takes a deep breath, he doesn't want to die.   
He hasn't come this far and survived this long to throw it all away on a coping mechanism that no longer works for him. If he's going to die, it's going to be by choice, he tells himself, not by accidentally hitting a vein and bleeding out on a motel bathroom floor. He has to stay in control, and right now he's really, really not.

Sam's almost bowled over when Dean speaks, hesitant but honest.

"Sometimes, I don't know." He scrapes a fleck of blood off the back of his hand and tries again, collects his thoughts and tries to force them to make sense. He sucks at this. "Sometimes you're just cold, like so cold you can't breathe or think... and it takes more than fucking someone you don't know to keep yourself warm. You can't drink the cold away, can't kill it or fuck it away, you just..."

"This?" Sam taps the bandage lightly, not missing the flinch that he doesn't entirely feel sorry for causing. 

"Yeah, I guess." Dean shrugs, purposefully looking anywhere else in the room but at Sam. His resolve is quickly fading; he couldn't say what he meant and he feels stupid now for trying. "We need to hit the road, man. Loosing daylight here."

"Daylight we can lose, you we can't." He gently grabs his brother's chin and forces him to meet his eyes. Dean looks like death, but he's still breathing and there's still fight in his eyes, and that's enough for Sam. That's enough for them to keep going, for now. "We're gonna work this out, okay? You and me."

In the space that stretches miles between them, something thinks, maybe, about healing.

"Okay Sammy." Dean doesn't believe it, but he's willing to try. For Sam, he's willing to try. If he can't hold humpty-dumpty in one piece anymore, maybe Sam can put him back together. "Okay."


End file.
